It's not just the US where some growing up needs to happen. France's Sarkozy could use a dose of adulthood himself.
No one wants gypsies, travelers, Roma around, but many don't mind dressing like them even if they don't like the idea of the stubbornly other others.
Where the US is having a spasm of religious suspicion (you know, as kind of side dish to its constant ethnic tension), here it's gypsies and a couple governments stomping on the hornets' nest. It's easy to do because these are peoples who deliberately do not integrate, or assimilate, and frequent don't cooperate. They pretty much want to keep to themselves and do take care of their own. Independence is the key stone of their culture. They are not usually thieves and kidnappers of children (that's organized crime), but it's easy to think so since the odds that the average European is friends with a traveler or Roma are kinda slim. The contemporary gypsy is a slow moving nomad in a mobile home or a camper van, and Europe is a place where nomadic cultures settled down in one place a L O N G time ago. So, figuring out the legal status, which settled nations base on citizenship, of a nomad who moreover does not want to be a citizen is really hard to do.
But, it's grown a bit nasty again in the recession. All the people on a nation's soil cost money, and money is thin on the ground for the world's governments these days. So, where the American public is being childish and mean; France and Italy are leading a controversial push to make it easier to kick people out of their countries. Many of the Roma in France come from Romania, which Sarkozy argues, receives about 4 billion euros from the EU, but spends just .04% of that on their gypsy minority, which results in that minority moving off to other countries. The UN, Human Rights Campaign, the Vatican, about half of Sarkozy's cabinet and lots of Europeans think this policy is bad, wrong, and generally mean.They deplore it, loudly, on behalf of the Roma and against the precedent this move sets.
Sarkozy is in a tough fight for re-election, and he's running to the right. As he is wont to do, and as many US conservative politicians do (flags, guns, gays, god, immigrants, ....) when they feel a real challenge. It's a reflex. It's as dangerous and boring as most mental or cultural reflexes. What bothers me is that Sarkozy is flirting with cultural policies that are very close to those of national socialist groups in Europe whose economic policies would appeal to US conservatives, but whose cultural programs are openly reminiscent of those infamous national socialists. (Though, lately, it seems that those darker policies are developing some appeal as well.)
England is taking a slightly different tack. Here, the trouble with travelers is that they tend to set up camp on undeveloped land that doesn't belong to them. Not surprising, that's what travelers have always, for centuries (maybe millennia) done. Here, the government recognizes traveler communities, and is in a pickle over where to let them set up camps and how to balance that living space against local town's needs, taxes, green belt space, and other concerns. There's even work on making sure their children are decently educated. I'm not sure of the communities in France, but one factor that may ease some (certainly not all, hating on travelers is tradition here) of the friction between these margin dwellers and established society is that they share a language. French (the government I mean here) really don't like people who don't speak French.
So, what's going on there with the fashion trend right in the same season France and Italy are getting in snit over gypsies? Why do people like the food, the music, the style of this or that other-group (gypsy style and guitar, gansta rap, soul food, jazz, gospel, Tex-Mex, ...) while despising the people who create it? The connection isn't that these others are all criminals, since they aren't or only pretend to be, or their criminality is a rather passive even a secondary effect of social forces other than their own will to break a law.
I am guilty of indulging in the identity appropriation of gypsy fashion, have been for a long time. A good chunk of my wardrobe is still gypsy-esque and "bohemian." This has a great deal to do with my antipathy for offices. And that's the link to my sympathy; well, that and the fact that gypsy guitar turns me on. In high school, I loved the aura of gypsies not for their nomadism, a little bit for the romantic image of them, and a lot for their deliberate alienation. I felt pretty darn alienated in the age of "greed is good," and was looking for ways to increase that feeling and status. I figured, the farther out of the current, the fresher the waters. Every Halloween, gypsy costume. J-Lo's Roma-inspired dance-centric video and that movie about chocolate with cinnamon and cayenne pepper ground in it, the one with Johny Depp and Juliet Binoche and the low key ultra sexiness of Depp's gypsy, those had not been made. So, it was mostly the travelers' ability to build a whole culture (I didn't know there several) outside/alongside the dominant one--their choice of the margin over the center, their willingness to do what it takes to live Out There. I admired that and their general talent for not being destroyed (shooed away, sure, and then the Nazi's really went for them, but mostly not destroyed).
What's interesting, I think, to America from the France vs. England approaches to these others is that it links to our issues and debates over migrant workers in the US illegally. They're not gypsies--not people who would prefer to roam--but economically dispossessed folk looking to feed their kin. The consequent effects of their presence in the US is not their goal. And like them, the gypsies over here are not interested in doing harm, they're just interested in getting by and doing right by their families and culture. France wants to throw them out, now, and finger print them so they can't sneak back in. England wants to work out what the British call "reasonable accommodation." They see these people as people, not problems and political pawns.
There's a surprising lot of good information about the Roma and British and Irish travelers here at the BCC, and much coverage of the current debates over at The Guardian. It's fascinating stuff.
Ok, so, next post: cabinetry. I promise. Time to lighten up a bit around here.
